Tracing the changes in Australian English from the First Fleet to present day is really about exploring the story of the nation, author Kel Richards says.

The English language arrived in Australia a little more than 200 years ago and since that time it has been levelled, sculpted and adapted to give Australians a specific dialect.

"When you trace the story of Australian English from 1788 to the present day, you find yourself actually tracing the story of the whole nation," Richards told 702 ABC Sydney's Dominic Knight.

Beyond the influences and movements that shaped our use and understanding of English, Richards said we first needed to consider our concept of language.

"They now say there is no such thing as English, the English language doesn't exist, there are only Englishes, only dialects.

"We have our dialects and as it happens, quite by coincidence, it is the best, most colourful, most inventive English dialect on the planet."

Richards has studied and interpreted the language's history and documented it in his new book, The Story of Australian English.

The beginnings of the Australian accent

According to Richards, the beginning of our Australian accent emerged following the arrival of European settlers in 1788.

"It emerged from a process called levelling down because you had all these people who came here on 11 ships from different dialect areas, regional dialect areas across England," he said.

"They all spoke differently and they used different words and what they had to do, in order to communicate with each other, was to level their dialect variations down."

Around 50 years after the colony was established, Richards said English people arriving in Australia started to claim that Australians were speaking the "purest English on earth".

This discovery period of other ways of speaking and other words for things brought an acute awareness of the language and sound.

"What our accent really is, is English with the dialect variations taken out.

"We now think of it as being our dialect, and it is, but that's what was happening in those early [days], it happened really fast."

Language 'ambushed' by elocution movements

About 100 years on from the First Fleet, Richards said the arrival of the elocution movement in the 1880s and 1890s "ambushed" our language and changed it for good.

"It started off on how to annunciate and speak clearly but what they did was pick one dialect, standard southern English, and they said 'that is correct'.

"Standard southern English came to be what is called RP, Received Pronunciation, Oxbridge, that kind of accent.

"That was right, everything else was wrong."

According to Richards, before this time general, middle Australian accents were predominant before cultivated and broad Australian accents arrived later, as a reaction to the elocution movement.

The story of our language, from 1788 to the present day, is actually the story of the nation.

Kel Richards

"The evidence for this is that in the late 1950s, researchers went out and tape recorded some elderly people in their 80s and 90s who had been born in the far west of New South Wales and some of them in Tasmania," he explained.

"They all had general, middle Australian accents because when they were born in the 1880s and 1890s. There was no broad Australian, there was no cultivated Australian, it hadn't happened yet."

Population movements from the early military colony days to the stock industry, gold rushes and onwards undoubtedly had an impact on the variations in accent across the country.

However, Richards said perhaps not to the degree seen in other countries.

"If you look at what happened in America, the Pilgrim Fathers landed at Plymouth Rock and they stayed there and built up that colony.

"Another group of English people landed at Savannah, in Georgia, and they built up that colony and they remained in these isolated colonies for about 100 years.

"They developed their own vocabulary, their own accents, hence the range of accents in America."

Tracing the story of our language and the influences

As Richards explained, English dialect words, patois spoken by thieves called the Flash language, some military terms and Indigenous language have all informed the Australian vocabulary.

"They had to turn to the locals and say 'what do I call that?'

"It is such a rich and important part of our language."

In terms of Flash language as spoken by the convicts, a man by the name of James Hardy Vaux who authored an autobiography at the time, documented much of the slang found littered in our language today.

"A word like swag, swag was a bundle of stolen goods," he said.

"Then it becomes any bundle of goods and then the person who carries it becomes a swagman and suddenly you're in the middle of Waltzing Matilda, that's the way it works.

"The story of our language, from 1788 to the present day, is actually the story of the nation."